About Therese:

Therese Poletti has been a journalist for over 20 years and is the author of “Art Deco San Francisco: The Architect of Timothy Pflueger,” published by Princeton Architectural Press. She is also the current Preservation Director of the Art Deco Society of California, where she has worked on preservation efforts such as the city landmarking of El Rey Theatre on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco. She has also written for The Argonaut, a twice-yearly journal published by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, and the online edition of Preservation, the magazine published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, VIA Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. She has also been a volunteer with the non-profit San Francisco City Guides since 1999, where she is the tour coordinator and guide for the Downtown Deco walking tour. Currently, she is a senior columnist at MarketWatch, where she writes about machinations and corporate misbehavior in the technology industry. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has an undergraduate degree in English, Comparative Literature, from Santa Clara University. She sporadically maintains a blog, musings about Art Deco and Modernism, called the Timothy Pflueger Blog. She is also a big fan and supporter of film noir, and met her husband Andrew at Noir City, the film festival sponsored by the Film Noir Foundation at Pflueger’s Castro Theater in San Francisco.

Pflueger-Rivera Collaboration

The architect and the artist: a brief talk by Therese Poletti will focus on the collaboration of San Francisco Art Deco master Timothy Pflueger and famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in the turbulent 1930s in the United States, and the resonance of their work today. In the early 1930s, as the onset of the Great Depression was beginning to be felt, San Francisco architect Timothy Pflueger orchestrated a symphony of modernistic art inside a capitalist institution, a luncheon club for the traders at the San Francisco Stock Exchange designed right before the stock market crashed in 1929. Pflueger hired nine artists, sculptors, painters, and world renowned muralist Diego Rivera, a cadre that would anticipate the government-funded socialist art under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal just a few years later. And like the artists of the Federal Arts projects, some would prove to be controversial, especially the hiring of the avowed Communist Rivera as the star of the project. Inside the Stock Exchange Luncheon Club, Rivera painted “Allegory of California, in the fresco style, saluting its industry, agriculture and natural resources, centered on tennis star Helen Wills Moody on the wall of a stairwell, while Pflueger defended his hiring in a media storm. When the interior was complete, other art works ranged from modern bas reliefs sculpted into granite walls, inlaid wood on dining room walls, bronze elevator doors etched with a variety of San Francisco iconic buildings, and custom designed furniture. Above the main entrance to the Exchange Tower, a sculpture of the Progress of Man echoed Rivera’s larger than life figures by sculptor, Ralph Stackpole, set on a background of a stylized rainbow and lightning bolt. Some of these artists would then go on to paint the frescoes at Coit Tower, a pilot project for the New Deal, or work with Pflueger at the stunning Paramount Theater in Oakland, or in 1936, at the George Washington High School in San Francisco. The murals both at Coit Tower and at the Works Progress Administration-funded George Washington High, are heavily influenced by Rivera’s work, with strong socialist commentary and bold colors, done in the fresco style. The art work is integral to all of these buildings. In Pflueger’s Stock Exchange Tower and George Washington High School, the design of buildings is a sparer version of Art Deco, with sculpted angular reliefs at the entrance, while the interior art plays a dominant role. Pflueger’s Stock Exchange Luncheon Club was Rivera’s first U.S. commission, and their collaboration was a fruitful one, resulting in some of San Francisco’s most important art work of the era. Rivera would then go on to do other work in the U.S., including another mural at a San Francisco art school, the murals in Detroit in both celebration and in fear of industry, and his ill-fated mural at Rockefeller Center. Nine years later, Rivera would return to San Francisco do a massive nine-panel mural on canvas at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939-1940, where the act of painting by Rivera and his assistants became part of the Fine Arts Exhibit at the fair. Pflueger dubbed it “Art in Action,” and Rivera worked with a pistol in his pocket, afraid for his life after the assassination of fellow Communist Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. Today, coming full circle, the murals at George Washington, by Communist émigré Victor Arnautoff, who was also lead muralist at Coit Tower and who studied with Rivera, are endangered. The City of San Francisco’s school district has voted to paint over them because of their unflinching look at the life of George Washington, portraying him as a slave owner. The art that resulted from the partnership of master architect and a group of varied artists is still touching nerves today. Therese Poletti is the preservation director of the Art Deco Society of California and the author of “Art Deco San Francisco, the Architecture of Timothy Pflueger,” published by Princeton Architectural Press. She has been a journalist for over 20 years, and is also a volunteer San Francisco City Guide. She occasionally writes for her Timothy Pflueger Blog. Blog.timothypflueger.com